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Oil painting is probably one of my favourite mediums to use while creating but since its been a while since I’ve used them and I had only ever created stuff from the technique I learned at high school, I thought I should do a little bit of research on it. The way I’ve only ever used oil paints is with turps (turpentine) and using that to thin out the paint in order to use it.

While I was looking up inspiration for my oil painting I noticed a lot of people mentioned the fat over lean method. This isn’t something I had learned in school so I was very intrigued. While I don’t find anything wrong with simply just using turps in my oil paints I want to try and achieve this method when doing one of my analogue illustrations. Basically the fat over lean method is using a thinned out oil paint for the bottom layer, say using turps, and in this layer most people just do a quick outline of what they are going to be doing using a neutral colour like burnt umber. This also quickens the drying time of that first layer. Then for the next layer where you will be adding in colour you make it ‘fatter’. This can be done by adding in mediums or oils, many people mentioned linseed oil but there are lots of a variety of things out there. And then if you wanted to add in a third layer with more detail, obviously you would be making it fatter again by adding more of the medium or oil.

Using this method is beneficial because if the underlayer is thicker and hasn’t dried yet and you then go and put another layer onto that may be thinner and dries before the first layer, it can cause cracking to the painting.

There are two artists that I came across while looking at oil paintings that have really captured my eye and I really like their style and they both have a different way of doing their paintings. The first, Lena Danya uses the method of creating a first layer with a neutral colour and then building onto it. I really like her style, especially her water series.

The second artist that I also really like is Daria Callie. I love how she just keeps the background plain but it still draws you into it.

For this project we are to create a minimum of 6 analogue illustrations of our chosen object, which mine as a reminder was my beautiful tea set from T2. We have a range of techniques that we can chose from, from drawing it with coloured pencils, painting with acrylic or ink, making a sculpture, to creating something out of paper or even creating a screen print piece. Along with all these options that we can choose from, there are a few that we HAVE to do, which include watercolour painting, charcoal, pastels, and a mixed medium. Firstly we have been doing watercolour in class and then will be covering the others in the following classes.

As someone who hasn’t really done anything watercolour since maybe primary school, I have found it pretty difficult. We practiced a few different techniques in class but I’m still trying to get the hang of painting an actual object with watercolour.

I decided to look up some more inspiration than the few we were shown in class, although I did like the children book like ones, I found some that I really liked the look of.

I love how they are so detailed but you can still tell that they have been created with watercolours. I would really like to try doing mine like this but considering the amount of detail there is on my object I might find this a bit hard as a beginner. I might have to go for a more abstract representation of my object, just creating the feel for the colours instead of trying to add in all of the detail, though maybe I could focus on a small section of the object to get the detail in.

The next is the charcoal and pastel drawings. I haven’t had too much experience with these either, but I do love the depth that charcoal can give to a drawing and the beautiful colours that pastels can create. I think I would really like to try and create something a little bit abstract with the pastel colours but still creating a clear representation of my object, along the lines of Pablo Picasso’s work, because he uses a lot of colour in some of them and I think that the pastels would work really well. I found these two images and thought maybe something along this style would look pretty cool.

One of the other techniques that I really want to do is oil painting. I absolutely love painting with oil paints, they blend so well together and can also create some texture in the painting. I also want to do acrylic and I would love to do a screen print because thats something I love doing, but I’m not sure I’ll have the time and money to do a screen print. Something I love about screen printing is the pop art aspect, so maybe I could create some pop art type paintings with my acrylic and oil painting.

For the illustration assignment which we had to produce 3 of was something that I really enjoyed. I first started with the illustration that included my object that was done for the photography project. Choosing the image with the object hanging off of string, this is what inspired my for the rest of my illustrations also. When I was looking at inspiration I really liked the look of the simple ones with defining lines and the use of one colour in the background and not really using shadows but rather using detail. With these in mind this is what I produced for my first illustration.

With the rest of my illustrations I wanted to keep them all really similar since this is the style that I really like doing. Keeping with the string theme I decided to do little terrariums with plants.

With my last one I was really struggling with what I wanted to do but still wanting to keep with the strings. I wanted to experiment with using a person so I thought that using a girl holding strings would bring relation to the other illustrations too. I was really happy with how this one turned out.

Not being as happy with my second illustration I decided to go back to it and do something else. Since I really love sea animals I wanted to try and do something with that, so I chose an octopus and for the strings thought that using fishing hooks would make more sense. So this is what I chose to replace for the second illustration.

So these are my final 3 illustrations. I wanted them to look like they all belonged together.

For this assignment we were asked to produce first two product shots. As I explained in my last blog post, I decided to use a tea cup that I have from T2. I love this tea cup because it has so many colours on it and I found that when taking photos and when it came to editing them, these colours really popped and the photos worked really well.

The photo above on the right is one of the many photos I took for the product shots. For submission I cropped the photo down so that there wasn’t so much empty space above the tea cup. After that I played around with the colours a bit enhancing the saturation and highlights of the main colours on the cup and that really made it pop. I chose this photo because I love the stillness of the splash that is captured and after some advice I then also blacked in the background so that there wasn’t any distracting elements in the photo.

I did a pretty similar thing for the next product shot above. Blacking in the background and enhancing the colours. Doing the same thing with the background made them seem as if they are a set of photos for this product and they both work really well together.

The next two photos for submissions were to be two portrait shots, one in colour and one black and white with our product optional. I decided to do the one in colour with my project because the cup just has so many wonderful colours on it so I didn’t want to change it to black and white.

The photo on the left again, is the original, and the one on the left is the one edited for submission. I lightened up the photo a little bit because the cup was coming across a little dark and took away a small fraction of shadows. I also blacked out the models shirt as the white kind of took away from the cup and didn’t make it as big of a focal point.

The image above is what I have chosen to submit as my black and white image. I chose this photo to change to black and white because I feel as though it gives it the right emotion and acts on what is happening with the models facial expressions.

The next part of the assignment was a conceptual/composited shot.

At first I made one but I wasn’t happy with it at all and then decided to try a few different ideas. The image with the splash I thought would look really cool if it was as though a whale was coming out of the cup and making the splash. The second one I tried is the one on the left. After I found a birds eye view of someone in the water I thought that would look pretty cool inside one of my birds eye views of the cup. I am happy with how this one turned out as well because with the jug next to it, its as if the ocean has been poured into the cup with someone inside of it.

The last part of the assignment was to submit a photo choosing a style or technique that we may like. One style of photography that I love is landscape photography. As I went on a trip down to Melbourne and we were driving, I thought that this might be a great opportunity to try and take some landscape photos using a camera with manual settings. Now, i’m no pro, but I am pretty happy with how some of them turned out.

These are all the edited versions of the photos. I’m not too sure on which one I’m going to use to submit yet but I really like either the first one or the third one. Theres just something I love about the crashing of the waves and the colour of the sea.

For our photography project I decided to use my tea sets that I have from T2 as my product. As we need 6 images all up, I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do for each thing but still decided to get some inspiration images up.

In one of the product shots I would really love to get the steam in the image from hot tea and in the other I really like the idea of using different kinds of tea or flowers around it. I also have an idea of using rope and tying two cups together or rope holding up the tea pot.

For the portrait shots I really want to have someone holding the cup and also maybe trying to get some steam there too, or even someone sitting down like in the inspiration above. The photos above have given me some ideas of what I can do for a conceptual shot. I really love how they have used the sea as the drink and replacing the steam for things like fog and clouds. It would be cool to have a whale peaking out of the water too.

This trimester has started of with photography in studio 2. It has been really enjoyable setting up all the studio lights and positioning the lights to where you want them to get a good photo. We first started off outside taking some photos and I think this would have been better if we had some better scenery to photograph because I really love landscape photography. Getting all of the colour of nature into photos and beautiful views from all around the world is something that I really admire and if I ever chose to do photography, landscape photography is what I would do.

One of my favourites that I’ve discovered is Max Rive. His photos are really breathtaking, I don’t think I could pick a favourite.

One of the things that I’ve learnt the past few weeks is having to take heaps of shots of something because you don’t really know what it looks like till you bring it up on a computer screen. A shot that you thought looked really cool could look awful and vice versa. Another thing is that not all pictures that you take have to stop there. You can edit them in the slightest way, even just by changing the exposure or tone, and it can really transform the photo.

Here are a few that I have taken that I’ve really liked and edited some using lightroom.

In this photo I really tried to blur out the background as much as I could so that the focus was just on the log, the original is pretty washed out but the edited version really brings out all of the colours that were in the log.

I really like the dynamic of this photo and when I decided to edit it I brought out the pink more in the jumper.

The same goes for this photo, I brought out more of the pink and made the writing on the left a little more readable.

I really love the emotion that only using one light brings to photos. Although the photo with two people would have been a bit better if the other persons face was lit up just a tiny bit more.

These photos were done using two lights. I tried doing the shot of the two people back to back again using the two lights, I think I needed to maybe bring the lighting down a fraction or position the lights differently to have a better effect.

So one of my friends is turning 21 in July and I have the pleasure of making the invitations for her. She showed me what kind of cake she is hopefully getting made and she wants the invitations to suit the cake, which the cake suits her perfectly well.

So thats the cake.. very pink and florally. As she wants the invites to reflect the cake we decided on using white, pinks, and gold with a basic black for most of the font. Lots of ideas came to my head but when we were looking at inspiration she really liked the look of the one in the middle of my mood board.. like she loved it.

I wanted to try and incorporate something else into it too so I made a mood board for inspiration, as you do.

I didn’t feel the need to really pick out a certain colour pallet as with the colours she wanted she also said that all different shades of pink would be nice. With this in mind, and my inspiration in mind, I thought that using watercolours would be the best way to go to get all different shades of pink that would look good together and this would also suit the cake.

I really wanted to try and make my own watercolour patterns and flowers to then bring onto the computer and onto the invites, but as she needed these like yesterday, I just didn’t have the time or the money to go and buy all the stuff that I needed to do this. So instead I searched the trusty web for some watercolour brushes and backgrounds that I could use, I also searched for some watercolour florals. I ended up getting some really good pink swabs and pink and gold ones, I only found a few watercolour florals that I thought were good enough to use so I had to really work with what I found. Which this all would have been easier and fun if I could have made these myself.

This is one of the first iterations that I made. Of course taking out the address and phone number.

She really loved this. I really loved the gold dots because they have a little bit behind them that is a pink watercolour which I then also used for her name, and adding in the pink watercolour stroke on the circle really made it feel all together. She also decided on having a dress up theme for her birthday but we decided the best way to communicate this with everyone was to write it on a seperate piece of paper and include that with the invites so that the invites didn’t look too over crowded and there just wasn’t enough room to add it to them.

I made these half the size of the invitations so when the invitations are folded they could be placed perfectly inside them. This is the finished product for that.

I really wanted to make it look a little bit different but still suit the invites so I really emphasised on the watercolour this time. She really like the gold dots in this a lot better so asked if the gold in the invites could be changed. So I ended up doing that but I left her name the gold it was so that it wasn’t too much of the same because I still wanted them to be seperate items.

So these are my finished product. Im really happy with how they turned out, though if I had the time and the money I definitely would have tried doing all of the watercolours and florals myself.

This weeks lecture was all about using social media to promote yourself.

I found it really interesting to hear about using a social media platform in a way that I wouldn’t usually use, by setting goals to achieve an outcome. Discussed in the tutorial was a way of setting these goals to achieve an outcome, which was using the 5 W’s and 1 H. Who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Who am I going to follow? What am I going to post? When will I post something? Where am I going to post it? Why am I posting it? How do I want to be seen?

When I started to make a social media page for my designs and connecting to people, the first thing that I had to do was to choose which social media platform I wanted to use, so I had to look at the ‘where’ aspect of the 5W1H. I chose to post things on Instagram. I found that being a graphic design student, Instagram was the best social media platform that allowed me to showcase my work while adding a little description and being able to comment on other creators work. After I chose my platform it was then time to answer the other questions, this helped me to set goals. I want to follow other people in my field and also in other creative fields, I want to post things that I have created and also things that inspire me, I want to try and post something every week and I ave to keep in mind what time I am going to post things, I am posting things to be seen, and how I want to be seen by others is professionally but also revealing who I am as a person.

I had no trouble figuring out all of these things that I want to do with social media because I am a very pro-social media kind of person. I think that using social media to promote yourself is a smart thing to do in todays day and age since just about everyone uses it and it is where a lot of people get discovered. It was really interesting to hear everyone else’s ways in which they are going to approach the 5W1H, especially those who aren’t so eager to use social media. It kind of astonished me the amount of people who are so against the use of social media. They don’t like it for many reasons like bullying or being a waste of time, it is really interesting how social media can effect everyone differently.

Now that I have set my goals, I need to actually do them to achieve my outcome. Using social media, especially Instagram, for my work is just one of the many ways that I can use to be seen by the world.

BibliographyComic One [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved December 7th, 2016, from https://au.pinterest.com/pin/258534834829319590/

Comic Two [Image] (2013). Retrieved December 7th, 2016, from http://www.discoveringidentity.com/2013/03/22/social-media-balance-or-lack-thereof/

Comic Three [Image] (2012). Retrieved December 7th, 2016, from http://tech.david-cheong.com/are-you-living-in-the-internet-infinity-loop/

This whole weeks lecture really drew me in just from the title. I found it interesting to learn all the different ways that workers in the creative industry actually make their money. I always knew of the typical working for a company or freelancing, but i had never even thought about others like having your own studio or crowdfunding. It was also really interesting hearing that different parts of the creative industry, like audio for instance, have the same ways they can make money as designers but also have a few extra paths that designers wouldn’t usually take.

When I think about my career after graduating I always saw myself working for a company as an employee, sitting at a big desk in a meeting portraying my ideas.

I had also never thought about the fact that creative industries all intersect with each other. So as a designer I could be working in any other field creating design aspects of their projects. Ever since that was mentioned I have thought non-stop about all of the possibilities that I really have. I was always so scared coming into the creative industry because people would always say things like “thats a hard industry to get into” or “there aren’t really many jobs out there for that” when really there are endless possibilities. Something that I have mostly thought about is where I want to be working, and since music, along with design, is another passion of mine, I would absolutely love to be working in the music industry. Whether it be making album covers, working at a music magazine, at a radio station, but the one thing that I would absolutely love is making posters for festivals. Music festivals are incredible and whenever I look at any festival poster I think “that’s what I want to be doing”. They’re just so aesthetically pleasing to me.

Although freelancing is something I have been doing a bit of while I started my design course, I feel like it isn’t really for me. Freelancing or having my own studio also has its pros, but I feel like I need more experience to pursue this career path, and there also wouldn’t be a steady income if I chose one of these ways to work.

Although they both have their pros and cons, I guess it just comes down to what is more important to each person. A steady income? Or being a big hit?

As a steady income is something that I consider a priority, working for a company as an employee is still something that I would rather do than being a freelancer.

Working at an agency [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved December 5th, 2016, from https://www.roberthalf.com/creativegroup/need-work/career-resources/agency-life/what-is-it-like-working-at-an-agency-in-the-creative-industry

These are beautifully designed bottles by Dennis Sommer and in collaboration with Talita Santos that have been designed to capture the essence that is held in the bottle. Originated from Vienna, the alcohol that is inside the bottles have been made with the aspirations of partly forgotten ingredients and natural flavours that have been used to create a unique drink. The flavours that have been engineered by Karl P. Egger have been thought out by turning alchemy into science. He was influenced by inspirations taken from all over the world, and the scents have been dedicated to scents of natures wealth.The design of these series aims to merge creativity with alcoholic spirits. Every bottle has been dyed by the essence of the fruit that is inside the drink by hand, creating a tasty drink to match an aesthetic bottle.

I think that this design works extremely well. It creates a more calm vibe for its consumers which is something that alcoholic drinks, and alcohol in general, does not do. The design of the different colours and style also draws your attention to it, this is a great attribute as there are a lot of alcoholic drinks in the market. Even the design of the information about the bottle works really well, it uses a lot of white space that is in the middle that sort of resembles the bottle its self, with there being a cap at the top, then the alcohol with it being clear and then the colour. I love that the colours all match the taste that is meant to be inside the bottle, this makes the design as a whole work brilliantly well. Just looking at the bottle creates a distraction and makes you even forget that its even an alcoholic drink, which I believe may be a good thing.

The design is about combining the look with the taste. It obviously does this very well as we commonly associate colours with a certain fruit or something familiar. I think that along with the calm vibe, it also portrays a sense that you are going to be drowning yourself in water, but because the water is colourful, drowning yourself in these waters wouldn’t be as bad, it is somewhat inviting to its consumers to drown in their sorrows. I think that it is also a great design for the younger market. Using colours and a watercolour effect would really draw to the younger consumers when they are trying to pick out something to drink.

These series of bottles are very pleasing to the eye, this means it would catch anyones attention enough to at least pick up the bottle and read what it’s about, or they might see the bottle and think oh, that’s (raspberry for example) flavoured. I think that it is an extremely well design, it’s aesthetically pleasing, tells a story and conveys a meaning.

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